LONDON On April 2, a wireless tower was set ablaze in Birmingham. The next day, a fire was reported at 10 p.m. at a telecommunications box in Liverpool. An hour later, an emergency call came in about another cell tower in Liverpool that was going up in flames.
Across Britain, more than 30 acts of arson and vandalism have taken place against wireless towers and other telecom gear this month, according to police reports and a telecom trade group. In roughly 80 other incidents in the country, telecom technicians have been harassed on the job.
The attacks were fueled by the same cause, government officials said: an internet conspiracy theory that links the spread of the coronavirus to an ultrafast wireless technology known as 5G. Under the false idea, which has gained momentum in Facebook groups, WhatsApp messages and YouTube videos, radio waves sent by 5G technology are causing small changes to peoples bodies that make them succumb to the virus.
The incidents starkly demonstrate how coronavirus conspiracy theories have taken a dark turn by spilling out into the real world. In just a few weeks, the pandemic has given pre-existing fringe ideas online new urgency by playing on peoples fears.
Before the coronavirus, rarely did such theories cause as much tangible harm so quickly, disinformation researchers said.
In the United States, one person died after self-medicating with chloroquine, which was touted online as a miracle cure for the coronavirus even though its efficacy is unproven. And Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was assigned more security this month after unfounded theories spread that he was part of a secret cabal working to undermine President Trump.
Most conspiracies stay online, but this is having real-world impact, said Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of the E.U. DisinfoLab, a Brussels-based group tracking virus conspiracy theories. He called managing pandemic misinformation a new problem because the disease is global and people everywhere are hunting for information.
The false theory linking 5G to the coronavirus has been especially prominent, amplified by celebrities like John Cusack and Woody Harrelson on social media. It has also been stoked by a vocal anti-5G contingent, who have urged people to take action against telecom gear to protect themselves.
The idea has deep internet roots. An analysis by The New York Times found 487 Facebook communities, 84 Instagram accounts, 52 Twitter accounts, and dozens of other posts and videos pushing the conspiracy. The Facebook communities added nearly half a million new followers over the past two weeks. On Instagram, a network of 40 accounts nearly doubled its audience this month to 58,800 followers.
On YouTube, the 10 most popular 5G coronavirus conspiracy videos posted in March were viewed over 5.8 million times. Today, the conspiracy can be found on Facebook in over 30 countries, including Switzerland, Uruguay and Japan.
British politicians said the conspiracy theory and the violent acts it was causing were unacceptable.
This is nonsense of the absolute highest order, said Julian Knight, a member of Parliament who leads a committee investigating coronavirus-related online misinformation. He said Facebook and YouTube needed to get a grip on the situation or risk undermining the crisis response.
Mr. Knight added that the spread of 5G conspiracies raised alarms about how information about a future coronavirus vaccine would be disseminated.
If we were to get a vaccine for Covid-19, can we trust the social media companies to ensure that the right public health messages are put out about that vaccine? he asked. That could be a question of life and death for many people.
Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, said it was starting to remove false claims that 5G technology causes the symptoms of or contraction of Covid-19. YouTube said it would reduce recommendations of videos linking the coronavirus to 5G, while Twitter said it had taken action against misleading and harmful content about the illness.
Wild claims about 5G are not new. The technology has an outsize political importance because it may provide countries with a competitive edge, with faster wireless speeds enabling more rapid development of driverless cars and other innovations.
Internet trolls have seized on 5G and its political implications to sow fear, leading to protests in the United States and elsewhere against the technology in recent years. Russians have pushed claims that 5G signals were linked to brain cancer, infertility, autism, heart tumors and Alzheimers disease, all of which lacked scientific support.
In January, as the coronavirus rippled through Wuhan, China, and beyond, it provided new fodder for anti-5G trolls. On Jan. 19, a post on Twitter speculated on a link between 5G and the disease, according to Zignal Labs, a media insights company that studied 699,000 mentions of the conspiracy this year through April 7.
Wuhan has 5,000+ #5G base stations now and 50,000 by 2021 is it a disease or 5G? the tweet said.
On Jan. 22, an article on a Belgium news website included a comment from a physician claiming that 5G was harmful to peoples health. Though it did not specifically mention the coronavirus, the doctor mentioned a possible link with current events. The article, later deleted by the publisher, reached as many as 115,000 people, according to CrowdTangle, a tool that analyzes interactions across social media.
By last month, 5G-coronavirus claims on the web and television were rising, according to Zignal Labs. A YouTube video that connected the virus to 5G last month racked up roughly two million views before the site deleted it. And the singer Keri Hilson, as well as Mr. Harrelson and Mr. Cusack, posted online about the conspiracy.
A lot of my friends have been talking about the negative effects of 5G, Mr. Harrelson wrote on Instagram to his two million followers last week, sharing a screenshot of an article that drew links between the outbreak in Wuhan and 5G development there.
A representative for Mr. Harrelson, whose 5G posts have since been deleted, declined to comment. Ms. Hilsons manager said her posts had been removed because we feel that at this time it is important to focus on the things that we know are 100 percent accurate.
After publication of this article, Mr. Cusack, through his publicist, said he was raising general health concerns about 5G; his 5G tweets have been deleted.
The conspiracy particularly resonated in Britain. In January, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had given the Chinese technology company Huawei permission to set up 5G infrastructure in the country.
In recent weeks, conspiracy theorists began saying Chinas lack of transparency on Covid-19 was evidence that Huawei should not be trusted to install 5G in Britain. Some went further and called for the destruction of wireless equipment.
We need to bring 5G down, said one person in the Facebook group Stop 5G U.K., which has more than 58,600 members.
After the British government issued shelter-in-place orders on March 23, some conspiracy theorists commented that it was a trick to secretly build 5G masts out of public view.
On April 2, in one of the first 5G-coronavirus incidents, telecom equipment in a neighborhood of Belfast in Northern Ireland was set ablaze, according to local officials.
I just couldnt believe it, said Carl Whyte, a Belfast City Council member. They are seeing these conspiracy theories on social media and going out and destroying those masts.
Word of the fire spread around the Belfast area. Richard Kerr, the minister at Templepatrick Presbyterian Church in nearby Ballyclare, said, I was taken aback that it went to that level that people were prepared to commit arson.
Other fires of telecom towers followed in Birmingham, Liverpool and elsewhere. Videos of burning equipment were shared and celebrated on Facebook. Some videos also showed telecom technicians being harassed.
You know when they turn this on its going to kill everyone, a woman said of 5G in a recent video on Twitter, as she confronted technicians laying fiber-optic cables in an unidentified British town.
Mark Steele, a prominent anti-5G activist in Britain, said the fires were a result of people being frustrated that their safety concerns werent taken seriously. Asked if he believed 5G was causing coronavirus, he said, Its looking a bit suspicious, dont you think?
Telecommunications companies, which have added more security and are working with law enforcement, said the attacks against their workers and equipment had been widespread, threatening communication networks during the crisis. Vodafone said it had experienced at least 15 incidents, while BT has had at least 11. The companies said that in many cases, vandals had damaged existing infrastructure and not new 5G gear.
The police in Belfast, Liverpool and Birmingham said they were continuing to investigate the incidents, reviewing security-camera footage and asking the public for leads.
Anti-5G groups have continued adding hundreds of members. One Facebook user shared photos this week of a wireless tower being constructed in an unidentified area of Britain.
Light it up, one commenter responded.
Adam Satariano reported from London, and Davey Alba from New York. Ben Decker contributed research.
That's how Kate McKinnon kicked off NBC's "Saturday Night Live," which included sketches that were produced by the "SNL" cast from their homes amid the coronavirus pandemic.
"Saturday Night Live At Home" attempted to recreate the feel of a normal episode by having sketches, Chris Martin as a musical guest and Tom Hanks as host.
"It's good to be here, but it's also weird to be here hosting 'Saturday Night Live' from home," Hanks said from what appeared to be his kitchen. "It is a strange time to try and be funny, but trying to be funny is 'SNL's' whole thing, so what the heck, let's give it a shot."
Hanks, who was wearing a suit, added that this was the first time he's worn anything other than sweatpants in a month.
"This 'Saturday Night Live' is going to be a little different, for one thing it's been filmed entirely by the 'SNL' cast who are currently quarantined in their homes. ... Also, there's no such thing as Saturdays anymore," he said. "And we're not really live, but we're doing everything we can to make this feel like the 'SNL' you know and love."
"Ever since being diagnosed I have been more like America's dad than ever before since no one wants to be around me very long and I make people uncomfortable," Hanks said.
"SNL" also had sketches that included everything from Larry David playing Sen. Bernie Sanders from his home, Pete Davidson singing in his mom's basement, a sketch that made fun of Zoom conferences and "Weekend Update: Home Edition" with hosts Colin Jost and Michael Che.
The two made jokes about current events before getting an official update on the pandemic from Alec Baldwin's President Donald Trump.
"My approval rating is up, my TV ratings are through the roof and every night at 7 p.m. all of New York claps and cheers for the great job I'm doing," Baldwin as Trump said over the phone.
Baldwin's Trump then said that "we have to listen to the experts on this one" including his senior adviser Jared Kushner, Fox News host Sean Hannity and MyPillow inventor and infomercial star Mike Lindell.
"All absentee ballots are covered in coronavirus," Baldwin's Trump said. "Happy Easter, everybody!"
Away from the laughs, the show's musical guest, Chris Martin of Coldplay, played a rendition of Bob Dylan's "Shelter From The Storm."
For more than two years the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have warned that sub-Saharan Africa stands on the verge of a debt crisis. Ever since commodity prices began to fall in 2015, the public finances of nations stretching from Nigeria to Kenya and Chad to South Africa have deteriorated.
If China is the manufacturing centre of the world, Africa is its chief supplier of essential materials, from oil and copper to the rare-earth minerals used in mobile phones. As Chinas manufacturing waned in the middle of the last decade, so did the crucial foreign earnings that keep African nations afloat.
Making matters worse, an investment binge to build much-needed infrastructure left the continent with spiralling debt costs.
The high rate of interest that sub-Saharan governments pay on their debts means that the cumulative stock of loans can be modest in relation to national income but still be unaffordable.
This week, with the Covid-19 pandemic starting to have an impact on the African continent, senior officials at the IMF, the G20 and the World Bank will meet online for their spring conferences. To help them review the situation, research conducted by Kings College London and the Australian National University for the aid charity Oxfam found that more than half a billion more people could be pushed into poverty unless urgent action is taken to bail out the worlds poorest countries.
Oxfam said the impact of shutting down economies to prevent the virus spreading would wreck vital industries and risked setting back the fight against poverty in sub-Saharan Africa by up to 30 years.
If those governments attempt to intervene, as developed-world governments have, to support industries and communities suffering a sudden loss of income, then their public debts will soar and the world financial system will ultimately be threatened by debt defaults.
Health systems in Africa are expected to be overwhelmed and what welfare systems that are in place will buckle under the strain. Even better-equipped systems in China, the US, UK and much of Europe have struggled to cope.
For this reason, whichever way they turn, sub-Saharan governments are threatened by a financial collapse. Aid charities have already called for the IMF and World Bank to engineer a debt write-off to prevent such a situation arising. So far, the answer has been extra loans, albeit at low or zero interest rates, to bridge funding gaps in healthcare provision expected once the virus begins to make inroads.
One of the reasons for resisting write-offs can be found in the way debts have built up over the past 15 years. Almost from the moment the G7 wrote off a large slice of developing-world debt at the Gleneagles conference in 2005, African nations have allowed their debt-to-GDP ratios to inch upwards. Encouraged by the World Bank, they have sought loans from major commercial banks and the bond markets.
In the past six or seven years, the emphasis has switched to borrowing from China, in part to benefit from free advice on infrastructure projects, built by Chinese contractors. So a debt write-off by international public bodies like the IMF merely allows developing-world countries to keep paying their exorbitant private-sector debt bills and Chinese-backed development loans.
Another barrier is the lack, with a few exceptions, of any transformation in the governance of sub-Saharan states, despite 20 years of solid (albeit debt-fuelled) growth.
Many of the executives in aid agencies involved in debt relief make the point that corruption remains rife and inequality has increased, aided by developed-world lawyers, accountants and bankers who help African oligarchs stash their gains overseas tax-free.
Then there are the pre-colonial tribes and nations, which cut across todays borders and remain strong. They prevent post-colonial nations from developing strong governance and tackling corruption.
A repeat of the Gleneagles deal is difficult when so little appears to have changed in the meantime. Fatigue among donors, and a sense that money hasnt solved much so far, add to a sense of despair and fuel inaction.
Yet, this is not a time for considering the moral hazards. The G20 must act quickly, even out of self-interest. This is an interconnected world, and debts rebound if they are not dealt with as part of a programme that maintains confidence in the financial system.
To wait for another debt default in sub-Saharan Africa will serve no ones purpose. A rescue should be put in place now, before Oxfams dire predictions become reality.
Every crisis opens a course to the unknown. In an eye-blink, the impossible becomes possible. History in a sprint can mean a dark, lasting turn for the worse, or a new day of enlightened public policy.
Be still, my heart, but I see the latter. Some of the greatest advances in American history liberation of slaves, Social Security, robust clean air and water mandates were birthed by disaster.
For now, the coronavirus pandemic is an epic of sorrow, and has many mortal months still to run. But in the midst of our suffering, our grief for loved ones lost, our loneliness in social isolation, we have a chance to re-engineer our world.
Heres a look at what may follow as the pandemic starts to settle:
Health Care. Universal medical coverage, whether expanding Obamacare with a public option or some form of Medicare for all, is going to happen. Its had majority support for some time. The pandemic has just sped up the timetable. One poll found that 41 percent of adults are now more likely than they were before the pandemic to support a government-run care system covering all Americans.
When even the most dreadful Republicans but I repeat myself say that virus testing and treatment should be free, the door has opened to the obvious next step. Since the outbreak, one in four Republicans have suddenly come around to some version of what most nations already have.
Now, try running for office on a platform of taking away peoples health care. Or tolerating the condition that leaves nearly 28 million Americans with no health care at all. Yep, thats the current Republican policy, led by President Trumps attempt to gut Obamacare through the courts. Good luck with that in November.
Work. Paid family leave. Working at home. Universal sick leave. Subsidized day care. A livable minimum wage. Until about an hour ago, all of the above were considered progressive pipe dreams.
But just as World War II brought millions of women into factories, millions of people may settle into another workplace following the world war on coronavirus their homes.
Up to half the jobs in the United States could be done, at least partially, from home, by one estimate. Currently, fewer than 4 percent of jobs allow this. The benefits of telecommuting in terms of personal time, on the environment, on the psyche and on production could be enormous.
To those who cant work at home, for one bright and shining moment we all appreciate grocery clerks, truck drivers, nurses, home health care workers and others as heroes. But weve never treated them that way with the range of benefits available to those who wear a different collar.
Let Trump defend the broken status quo, while Joe Biden goes bold, defining what a people-centered economy would look like.
Food. With seven in 10 adults overweight or obese, the poor health and nutrition of most Americans is a horrid and accepted fact. But with the disproportionate number of Covid-19 deaths attributed to diet-related conditions, we are seeing, more rapidly, just how much this societal problem can kill.
This doesnt mean we should turn to fat shaming. But it does mean that, while looking at obesity as a public health problem as deadly as smoking, we can make some big structural changes in the food system.
For starters, there should be universal free school meals. Kids who take advantage of this are more likely to eat fruits and vegetables. But under the present system, many poor students feel so stigmatized that they go hungry instead.
For adults, the paradox of living in a nation where 40 million people face food insecurity while 40 percent of our food is wasted, makes no sense.
One quick solution is to allow all 42 million Americans who receive food stamps to shop online and get their groceries delivered like everyone else. One lasting solution is to standardize date labeling, so that food that may not be perfect quality is still safe to eat and can be used by food banks.
And its time to recognize the vital value of people who harvest our fruits and vegetables. Up to half of farmworkers are undocumented, and the Trump administration has been harassing and demeaning them.
But lo: The Department of Homeland Security has just classified farmworkers as essential critical infrastructure workers. Lets make that permanent through the big immigration fix that awaits a new president.
Climate. One byproduct of so many people working at home is clean air. With the global economy in a coma, emissions could fall by the largest amount since World War II. But this could have little impact on the trajectory of climate change if we dont make larger structural changes. China is already firing up its coal-powered factories.
We have only a few years to save ourselves from ourselves. Our trashed and overheated world is a slower pandemic. The good news is that, even with the crash in oil prices, renewable energy use is on an upward course. Coal is yesterday, no matter how much Trump tries to promote it and China drags its heels.
More than anything, the pandemic has shown how quickly things can change if they must. Carpe diem.
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Health officials reported Saturday that 58 more people tested positive for the novel coronavirus in Will County.
The additional cases bring the total number in Will County to 1,161, according to the Will County Health Department.
The department also announced two more people, a man in his 60s and a woman in her 80s, died after contracting the virus.
After one woman's death was allocated to another county, the number of Will County patients who had died after testing positive stood at 56 on Saturday.
The Illinois Department of Public Health also announced 1,293 new cases of the virus and 81 additional deaths across the state.
As of Saturday, 19,180 people in Illinois had tested positive for COVID-19 and 677 people had died after contracting it. Over 92,000 tests for the virus had been performed in Illinois as of Saturday.
The IDPH also said 86 of the state's 102 counties had reported confirmed cases.
The update from state officials came on the day the U.S. overtook Italy for the highest death toll from the virus in the world.
The Will County Health Department provides more information about coronavirus, including the number for a COVID-19 hotline on its website, willcountyhealth.org.
Were all dealing with a new normal right now, and according to the White Houses infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the novel coronavirus pandemic will continue to impact our lives on some level for the foreseeable future.
If you want to get to pre-coronavirus, that might never happen in the sense of the fact that the threat is there, Dr. Fauci said in a press conference on Monday, per CNBC. But... I feel confident that over a period of time, we will get a good vaccine, we will never have to get back to where we are right now.
Even then, though, Dr. Fauci said its unlikely that life will ever be 100% the same. When we say getting back to normal, we mean something very different from what were going through right now, because right now we are in a very intense mitigation, Dr. Fauci said. If back to normal means acting like there never was a coronavirus problem, I dont think thats going to happen until we do have a situation where you can completely protect the population [with a vaccine].
Without a vaccine, the risk of contracting COVID-19 will still be there, says infectious disease expert Amesh A. Adalja, M.D., senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. A vaccine is the only way we can control this virus for the long term, he says. It is not going to disappear until we get a vaccine.
A vaccine is the only way we can control this virus for the long term.
A vaccine is especially important for people who will have a harder time fighting off the virus, says Richard Watkins, M.D., infectious disease physician and professor of internal medicine at the Northeast Ohio Medical University. It is needed to prevent illness in everyone, but especially for those with a high risk of complications, such as the elderly or people with a compromised immune system, he says.
Its also unclear at this time how long someone is protected against the novel coronavirus after they get sick and recover. Once you get measles, youre protected for life, but thats not true of all infections, says William Schaffner, M.D., an infectious disease specialist and professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. You can get whooping cough more than once, and, if you get a cold caused by a coronavirus, you are protected against that strain for about a year. Then, the protection starts to wane.
If COVID-19 behaves like the common cold, even people who have already experienced the virus will be need to be vaccinated in the future, Dr. Schaffner says.
Vaccines can only go to market after theyre approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the process generally takes one to two years, sometimes longer, Dr. Watkins says.
First, a company or organization has to create a vaccine that they think is viable. In this case, a COVID-19 vaccine would be developed in cells in a lab, Dr. Schaffner says. If lab tests show that a vaccine has potential, it can move on to animal studies, the FDA says. If the vaccine appears to be safe in animals and studies suggest it will be safe for humans, it can be tested in clinical trials with people.
Clinical trials typically have three phases, with each phase using more people, the FDA explains. In the final phase, vaccinated people are compared with people who have received a placebo or another vaccine so researchers can learn more about the test vaccines safety and effectiveness, and to help identify common side effects. The trials also must prove that a vaccines benefits outweigh any potential risks.
Once all of that has been completed, vaccines are licensed and monitored closely as people begin using them.
Its not entirely clear. Dr. Fauci has said he expects that a vaccine will be ready anywhere from 12 to 18 months from now. That is a very, very rapid timeline, Dr. Schaffner says. But, he adds, the government has the ability to speed things up in situations like this.
Plus, several organizations are already making progress. Pharmaceutical company Inovio announced earlier this week that it has initiated phase one of the clinical trial of its COVID-19 vaccine, and said that the company is hoping to have something that can be used by the public in 12 to 18 months. The National Institutes of Health has also collaborated with Moderna Inc., and administered the first shot in a vaccine trial earlier this month.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University are also working on a vaccine right now, the school announced, and University of Pittsburgh scientists say their vaccinea microneedle patch that goes on like a Band-Aidhas been successful in creating antibodies against the novel coronavirus within two weeks of application. Its actually pretty painlessit feels kind of like Velcro, said Louis Falo, M.D., Ph.D., one of the vaccines researchers.
Not necessarily. If we flatten the curve and this first surge begins to diminish, and if there is a contributing seasonal component to this vaccine, Im sure the national government and state governors will want to loosen up our stay-at-home orders, Dr. Schaffner says. Obviously, the country has to start getting back to work. It will be a judgment call that will happen in the next few months.
However, Dr. Watkins adds, the virus makes the timeline.
As of now, plenty of groups are racing to try to be the first to get FDA licensing for their vaccine. Scientists are all using slightly different methods, Dr. Schaffner says. Were not putting all of our vaccine eggs in one basket.
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Stanley Plotkin, dubbed the "Godfather of Vaccines," has worked on vaccines for anthrax, polio, rabies and rotavirus. In the 1960s, at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, Plotkin invented the rubella vaccine, which is credited with eradicating the disease in the United States. Plotkin, a pediatrician and vaccinologist, is consulting for pharmaceutical companies on vaccine development to halt the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rubella, also known as German measles, resulted in mild illness for the adults that contracted it but caused major birth defects for fetuses in utero. The '60s saw "a rubella pandemic swept across the United States and Europe and left some 12,000 infants deaf, blind, or with both impairments," according to Wistar Institute. Plotkin's vaccine is the "R" in the MMR vaccine that children get worldwide.
CNBC interviewed Plotkin at his home outside of Philadelphia. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How does the COVID-19 pandemic compare to the rubella pandemic?
Rubella infected all kinds of people, but the danger was mainly to pregnant women. We have the current coronavirus, and it can kill people, so everybody is at risk.
Going back to rubella, there was a lot of panic among women, and I was able to calculate that 1% of all of the pregnancies in Philadelphia during the epidemic were affected by rubella. So women were very upset. Today, of course, everyone is upset because coronavirus can infect anyone and is particularly lethal for the elderly. Is today's effort appropriate? I think so. The question is whether one can stop the spread of the virus the way it has been successful in China. Our societies are not like Chinese society, and so it remains to be seen.
Obviously, the social disruption, the economic disruption, is considerably greater than it was with rubella, so how long can we continue? I'm not the person to judge that, but I think it's appropriate what we're doing today to stop the spread of the coronavirus and therefore to ultimately decrease the number of infected people. If we don't [socially isolate], then probably 70% to 80% of us will get infected.
Everyone is talking about "flattening the curve." What does that mean?
The point is to decrease the number of people who get infected, because obviously it's the infected people who transmit [the disease] to other people. If you decrease the number of people carrying the virus, you decrease the propagation of the [pandemic], and that's what the [social] isolation is attempting to do.
The question is, will there be a reservoir of virus which will cause the virus to return? The results in China suggest that at least, at the moment, you can stop the spread of the virus. Whether that will happen here or not remains to be seen.
What do you think of the US government's response to rubella vs. the coronavirus?
Although there was a lot of anguish in the '60s and research was launched by grants through the government, [the response to rubella] was not nearly the same kind of response as with the coronavirus. It wasn't the same panic. There wasn't the same investment of money. There wasn't isolation. This is a much bigger response than [with] rubella. We're in a big rush to develop vaccines against this coronavirus. In the '60s there were multiple efforts to develop vaccines, including my own, but it wasn't the same all-hands-on-board as it is now.
How do you develop a vaccine?
I had worked a lot on the oral polio vaccine, and so I had learned how to weaken a virus. When I launched the project to develop a rubella vaccine, essentially it was to weaken the virus to make it into something that immunizes people but [doesn't] cause the congenital malformations that the natural virus causes.
This is a much bigger response than [with] rubella. We're in a big rush to develop vaccines against this coronavirus. In the '60s there were multiple efforts to develop vaccines, including my own, but it wasn't the same all-hands-on-board as it is now.
One of the big differences is that today, which is 40 years later, we have many different ways of developing vaccines. Now there's something like 40 different projects to develop vaccines, with about half a dozen being far advanced. In those days, there were relatively few ways to develop vaccines, so there were only three or four projects [tackling rubella].
I have considerable hope for a [coronavirus] vaccine, but people have to understand that it's not something like in the movies where you can develop it overnight that it's safe and effective overnight. It's going to take roughly a year before there's enough vaccine, assuming all goes well.
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How has vaccine-creation technology changed since the '60s?
In the '60s we could kill an agent and use the killed material as a vaccine. But today we have ways of using the nucleic acids the DNA or the RNA constructs of the virus. We can use proteins. We can use "vectors," viruses that carry parts of another virus [to] immunize people. And there are other techniques of making proteins that are not exactly like the natural virus but can still immunize people. So that's why there's something like 40-odd efforts to develop the vaccine, of which I would say about six or 10 are actually on the way to being developed as we speak, and there are two in clinical trials already.
Your rubella vaccine was better than its competitors it produced higher levels of antibodies and had fewer side effects but here in the United States it got sidelined and failed to win government approval for 10 years "because of politics," according to a Science magazine article. Tell me about that.
It happened for a reason, which would not be repeated today. One of the competing vaccines was actually developed at the licensing authority, a branch of the FDA. For a pharmaceutical manufacturer, that was very appealing, because it meant that they would get a license for the vaccine because they'd be working with the licensing authority.
The vaccine that I developed was licensed in Europe at the same time. It was only after the accumulation of information about how the two vaccines worked that it was demonstrated that the vaccine that was being used in Europe was better. Therefore, the company actually dropped the vaccine that they had been making and started to produce the one that was being used in Europe.
The FDA does not develop vaccines [anymore]. [Plus], there are so many more ways to develop vaccines that you have multiple candidates, which is great.
You've been quoted saying that the US should license and produce more than one vaccine. What do you mean?
For two reasons one, because until you have large-scale use of a vaccine, you don't know everything about it; you don't know for sure whether your expectations about the vaccine are right. It may be that something you thought was not as good turns out to be better than the one that you thought was the best. It's only in use that you really can make that judgment.
The second, and perhaps more important point, is if we need a vaccine for the population of the world that's not possible for any one company to make. You need multiple manufacturers, so if you have three or four different types of vaccines and they are roughly equivalent in efficacy, so much the better.
How does politics impact the creation of a vaccine?
The main thing is [funding] for vaccine development. On average, it takes about half a billion dollars to develop and manufacture a vaccine. That includes the basic science; that includes the early clinical trials; it includes the Phase 3 trials, where [they] vaccinate thousands of people [and] follow them [to assess] safety and efficacy. Pharmaceutical companies normally spend that kind of money to develop that kind of vaccine, but it takes years to go through that process. With coronavirus, scientists are trying to speed things up and to do it in a most economical way but, still, to produce a vaccine to immunize everybody, there has to be a major investment.
There are some preliminary reports that there's more than one strain of COVID-19, just like there's more than one strain of the flu. Do you think this could become a seasonal problem?
That information is still controversial not everyone accepts the idea that there are different strains of the virus. That remains to be seen. There are four respiratory coronaviruses that were discovered years ago, which do cause common colds and come back each winter whether that's going to happen with [COVID-19] or not, nobody really knows for sure.
The global pharmaceutical manufacturing company Pfizer is working towards supplying millions of doses of a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the year, according to the company.
In partnership with German company BioNTech, known for its cancer treatments, the two health tech giants aim to rapidly advance multiple COVID-19 vaccine candidates into human clinical testing, according to a press release from Pfizer.
With BioNTechs head start in mRNA vaccines, which have seen results in animals with influenza, Zika and rabies virus, the two companies hope to supply millions of vaccine doses by the end of 2020.
The companies plan to rapidly scale up capacity to produce hundreds of millions of doses in 2021, according to the press release.
These developments will hinge on technical success of the development program and approval by regulatory authorities, according to the release.
BioNTech will contribute multiple vaccine candidates as part of its vaccine program, which are expected to enter human testing this month, according to the release.
The collaboration is unprecedented, Mikael Dolsten, Chief Scientific Officer and President, Worldwide Research, Development & Medical at Pfizer said in the release.
Combatting the COVID-19 pandemic will require unprecedented collaboration across the innovation ecosystem, with companies coming together to unite capabilities like never before, Dolsten said . I am proud of Pfizers collaboration with BioNTech and have every confidence in our ability to harness the power of science together to bring forth a potential vaccine that the world needs as quickly as possible.
On March 3, Pfizer announced it identified compounds that could potentially be used in a treatment for the coronavirus.
The company completed a preliminary assessment of certain antiviral compounds that inhibited the replication of coronaviruses similar to the one causing COVID-19 in cultured cells, according to a press release.
The company is now investing in materials that will accelerate the start of a potential clinical study of the lead molecule three or more months in advance of earlier estimates due to positive pre-clinic results, according to a press release.
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Reported coronavirus cases:
As they battle a pandemic that has no regard for borders, the leaders of many of the worlds largest economies are in the thrall of unabashedly nationalist principles, undermining collective efforts to tame the novel coronavirus.
The United States, an unrivaled scientific power, is led by a president who openly scoffs at international cooperation while pursuing a global trade war. India, which produces staggering amounts of drugs, is ruled by a Hindu nationalist who has ratcheted up confrontation with neighbors. China, a dominant source of protective gear and medicines, is bent on a mission to restore its former imperial glory.
Now, just as the world requires collaboration to defeat the coronavirus scientists joining forces across borders to create vaccines, and manufacturers coordinating to deliver critical supplies national interests are winning out. This time, the contest is over far more than which countries will make iPads or even advanced jets. This is a battle for supremacy over products that may determine who lives and who dies.
At least 69 countries have banned or restricted the export of protective equipment, medical devices or medicines, according to the Global Trade Alert project at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. The World Health Organization is warning that protectionism could limit the global availability of vaccines.
With every country on the planet in need of the same lifesaving tools at once, national rivalries are jeopardizing access for all.
The parties with the deepest pockets will secure these vaccines and medicines, and essentially, much of the developing world will be entirely out of the picture, said Simon J. Evenett, an expert on international trade who started the University of St. Gallen project. We will have rationing by price. It will be brutal.
Some point to the tragedy playing out around the world as an argument for greater self sufficiency, so that hospitals are less reliant on China and India for medicines and protective gear.
China alone makes the vast majority of the core chemicals used to make raw materials for a range of generic medicines used to treat people now hospitalized with Covid-19, said Rosemary Gibson, a health care expert at the Hastings Center, an independent research institution in New York. These include antibiotics, blood pressure treatments and sedatives. Everyone is competing for a supply located in a single country, Ms. Gibson said.
But if the laudable goal of diversification inspires every nation to look inward and dismantle global production, that will leave the world even more vulnerable, said Chad P. Bown, an international trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
President Trump and his leading trade adviser, Peter Navarro, have exploited the pandemic as an opportunity to redouble efforts to force multinational companies to abandon China and shift production to the United States. Mr. Navarro has proposed rules that would force American health care providers to buy protective gear and medicines from U.S. suppliers.
We just dont have the production capacity, Mr. Bown said, noting that Chinese industry is restarting, while American factories remain disrupted. Just as you dont want to be too dependent on China, you dont want to be too dependent on yourself. You have now walled yourself off from the only way you can potentially deal with this, in your time of greatest need, which is relying on the rest of the world.
For seven decades after World War II, the notion that global trade enhances security and prosperity prevailed across major economies. When people exchange goods across borders, the logic goes, they become less likely to take up arms. Consumers gain better and cheaper products. Competition and collaboration spur innovation.
But in many countries especially the United States a stark failure by governments to equitably distribute the bounty has undermined faith in trade, giving way to a protectionist mentality in which goods and resources are viewed as zero-sum.
Now, the zero-sum perspective is a guiding force just as the sum in question is alarmingly limited: Potentially vital supplies of medicine are in short supply, exacerbating antagonism and distrust.
Last week, the Trump administration cited a Korean War-era law to justify banning exports of protective masks made in the United States, while ordering American companies that produce such wares overseas to redirect orders to their home market. One American company, 3M, said halting planned shipments of masks overseas would imperil health workers in Canada and Latin America. On Monday, 3M said it struck a compromise with the government that will send some masks to the United States and some overseas.
In recent weeks, Turkey, Ukraine, Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, South Africa and Ecuador have all banned the export of protective masks. France and Germany imposed bans on masks and other protective gear, lifting them only after the European Union barred exports outside the bloc. India banned exports of respirators and disinfectants.
Britain has prohibited exports of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug now being tested for potential benefits against the virus. Hungary has banned exports of the raw material for that drug and medicines that contain it.
The export bans are not helpful, said Mariangela Simao, assistant director general for medicines and health products at the World Health Organization in Geneva. It can disrupt supply chains of some products that are actually needed everywhere.
President Trump has been especially aggressive in securing an American stockpile of hydroxychloroquine, disregarding the counsel of federal scientists who have warned that testing remains minimal, with scant evidence of benefits.
India is the worlds largest producer of hydroxychloroquine. Last month, the government banned exports of the drug, though it stipulated that shipments could continue under limited circumstances.
In this situation, each country has to take care of itself, said Satish Kumar, an adjunct professor at the International Institute of Health Management Research in New Delhi. If we are not able to take care of our population, it will be a very critical situation.
After Mr. Trump demanded that India lift the export restrictions on Monday night while threatening retaliation, the government appeared to soften its position.
In view of the humanitarian aspects of the pandemic, said Indias foreign ministry spokesman Anurag Srivastava, the government would allow exports to some nations who have been particularly badly affected an apparent nod to the United States.
Arithmetic suggested that a policy of stockpiling for national needs might leave other countries short. India is likely to require 56 metric tons, but now has only 38 metric tons, said Udaya Bhaskar, director general of the Pharmaceuticals Export Promotion Council of India, an industry body set up by the government to promote exports of Indian medicines.
One manufacturer, Watson Pharma, owned by Teva Pharmaceuticals and based in the western Indian state of Goa, was seeking to triple its production of hydroxychloroquine over the next two weeks.
As global pharmaceutical companies explore new forms of treatment for the coronavirus a complex undertaking even under ideal laboratory conditions they are having to navigate an additional layer of real-world intricacy: geopolitics.
Companies steeped in genomics and the rigorous demands of manufacturing must find a way to develop new drugs, begin commercial production and also anticipate how the predilections of nationalists running major economies may limit supplies.
One of the most closely watched drugs, remdesivir, is made by Gilead, an American company. Though clinical trials have not yet been completed, the company has been ramping up manufacturing to meet global demand in advance of the drugs approval.
Like many newer drugs, remdesivirs formula includes novel substances with limited global availability, according to a statement on the companys website.
Gilead is increasing production in part by expanding beyond its own facilities in the United States, contracting with plants in Europe and Asia, in a move that appeared to hedge its bets against trouble in any one place. The international nature of the supply chain for remdesivir reminds us that it is essential for countries to work together to create enough supply for the world, said Daniel ODay, Gileads chairman and chief executive, in an April 4 statement.
Gilead says it has enough of the drug to treat 30,000 patients, while aiming to amass enough to treat one million by the end of the year. But outside experts questioned whether that would be sufficient.
There is going to be a real fight over the allocation of the remdesivir supply if indeed it proves effective, said Geoffrey Porges, an analyst for SVB Leerink, an investment bank in Boston.
Another drugmaker, the New York-based Regeneron, is preparing a U.S. plant to produce a cocktail of antibodies developed in genetically engineered mice, with tests planned for hospitalized patients and as a preventative treatment. A similar antibody cocktail proved effective against Ebola.
The company is planning the extraordinary action of shifting the production of some of its most profitable drugs one that treats eczema, another for eyes to a factory in Ireland to make room for the experimental treatment.
Regenerons chief executive, Dr. Leonard Schleifer, said the decision to make the new drug cocktail in the United States was both geopolitical and practical.
You want to make it close to where the need is, and we anticipate there will be great need in the United States, he said.
He acknowledged that making products overseas now posed risks that they could be subject to export bans in that country. In addition, Regeneron is receiving federal funds to expand its manufacturing of the vaccine, which carries the expectation that the company will prioritize the American market.
It just made good sense to us to do this in the United States, Dr. Schleifer said.
China has seized on the pandemic as an opportunity to present itself as a responsible world citizen, in contrast to Western democracies that failed to reckon with the threat not least the United States, now the epicenter of the outbreak.
Ever since President Trump took office, unleashing tariffs on friends and foes alike, Chinas paramount leader, Xi Jinping, has sought to exploit the American abdication of global leadership as a chance to crown himself champion of the rules-based trading system.
Given that China is ruled by an unelected Communist Party that subsidizes state-owned companies and tolerates the widespread theft of intellectual property, those claims have strained credulity.
Chinas reputation has also suffered as it pursues its Belt and Road Initiative, a $1 trillion collection of infrastructure projects stretching from East Asia to Europe and Africa that has been engineered to spread Beijings influence and generate business for Chinese companies. Some recipients of Chinese credit have come to see the terms as predatory, prompting accusations that China is an ascendant colonial power.
China has dispatched doctors and ventilators to Italy while offering aid to France, Germany and Spain. Last month, as the European Union banned exports of protective gear, Serbias president, Aleksandar Vucic, embraced Chinas largess, even kissing the Chinese flag.
European solidarity does not exist, Mr. Vucic declared. I believe in my brother, my friend, Xi Jinping, and I believe in help from China. The only country that can help us now is China.
Chinese factories make 80 percent of the worlds antibiotics and the building blocks for a huge range of drugs. Chinese officials have pledged to continue to make these wares available to the world. Such moves may bolster Chinas standing, yet appear unlikely to pacify the Trump administration.
Certainly, it would help in projecting Chinas soft power, said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. But I dont know whether this would ease concerns in the West, particularly the United States, on the need to diversify the supply of the manufacturing of active pharmaceutical ingredients.
President Trump has long obsessed over the trade deficit with China as a supposed scorecard of American victimization. But given Chinas role as a dominant supplier of hospital gear and medicines, American health effectively depends on being able to buy more from Chinese factories.
Right now, the brightest shiny hope that we have is imports of this stuff, said Mr. Bown, the trade expert. Wed like to run the biggest trade deficit we could possibly find.
Its not that we are buying this stuff from China thats made us vulnerable, he added. Its that we are buying this stuff from China, and we decided to start a trade war with them.
China aims to become the first nation to crack the code for a vaccine, a milestone that could cement its status as a world superpower, resonating not unlike the United States putting a person on the moon.
Its importance lies in being able to display our scientific and technological prowess to other countries, said Yang Zhanqiu, a virologist at Wuhan University, in the central Chinese city where the coronavirus first emerged.
About 1,000 Chinese scientists are now engaged in creating vaccines for the virus, with nine potential versions in development, according to the government. The government is considering bypassing some phases of planned clinical trials to rush potential vaccines into emergency use as soon as this month.
But one element appears in conspicuously short supply international collaboration.
In 2003, when another coronavirus, known as SARS, spread through China with deadly impact, officials from the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deployed to Beijing to help the government forge a containment strategy. In the years that followed, Chinese and American authorities collaborated on epidemics in Africa.
But in recent years, American public health authorities have sharply diminished their presence in Beijing at the direction of the Trump administration, said Jennifer Huang Bouey, an epidemiologist and China expert at the RAND Corporation.
Given the overall sentiment that any scientific research will be helping China, the United States is really trying to reduce any collaboration with China, said Ms. Bouey. That really hurts global health.
Theres a lack of trust, said Mr. Huang at the Council on Foreign Relations. Nationalism remains very strong among the Chinese public.
Some international collaboration is taking place. Dr. Seth Berkley, the chief executive of the Gavi Alliance, a nonprofit group started by Bill and Melinda Gates that works to get vaccines to the worlds poor, noted that one of the best Ebola vaccines was discovered by a Canadian public health lab that was transferred to an American drug maker and then manufactured in Germany.
Thats how science is done, and we really ought to follow that paradigm, he said. Nothing illustrates the global nature of this problem better than Covid-19, which started off in Wuhan and spread to 180 countries within three months. This is a global challenge that requires a global response.
But even before a vaccine is confirmed, national governments are already seeking to lock up future supply.
In Belgium, a company called Univercells is preparing to manufacture two vaccines that are under development even before clinical trials are completed, according to its co-founder, Jos Castillo. Univercells expects to begin production by September, with the eventual aim of making as many as 200 million doses a year at a pair of plants south of Brussels.
One country Mr. Castillo declined to disclose it has already ordered half of the supply of vaccines that his company will initially make, a share that would decline to 10 percent as production increases.
Some countries will most likely fail to secure enough vaccine. Its really a matter of scarcity, Mr. Castillo said.
More than overwhelming demand explains the anticipated shortfall. Though the science behind developing vaccines has advanced substantially, making them often involves labor-intensive techniques that are not designed to quickly produce billions of doses.
The bottleneck is to produce it, to make it in very large quantities, Mr. Castillo said.
The sense of urgency appears to have inspired President Trump to try to persuade a German company that is developing a possible vaccine to relocate to the United States. The company, CureVac, has denied it was approached by the United States, and said it had no plans to move.
The president has other weapons. He could cite the Defense Production Act to force American companies to give the United States government priority over other buyers for potential vaccines.
A little-known unit within the Department of Health and Human Services, whose mission is to protect American residents from bioterrorism and pandemics, gives grants to companies to speed their vaccine development. It also often comes with the requirement that recipients supply the government with a stockpile, said James Robinson, a vaccine manufacturing expert who sits on the scientific advisory board of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, an international consortium dedicated to making vaccines available worldwide.
That division, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, recently gave nearly $500 million to Johnson & Johnson to help it develop a coronavirus vaccine and set up a U.S. manufacturing facility.
Johnson & Johnson declined to say whether its arrangement with the government would require it to set aside vaccines for American use. It said it currently had the ability to produce as many as 300 million doses a year at its facility in the Netherlands, was preparing to manufacture a similar number in the United States, and was working with outside partners to add capacity elsewhere.
If the current administration is still in place when the vaccines are available, they are going to be really merciless in terms of privileging the U.S. for supply versus the rest of the world, said Michel De Wilde, a vaccine research consultant, and a former executive at Sanofi, a French vaccine manufacturer.
Around the world, 50 potential vaccines are now in the early stages of development, according to the W.H.O. If history is any guide, scientists will eventually produce an effective version.
What is less certain is whether the benefits will be shared.
Im worried about every country that has the potential to manufacture the vaccine, said Dr. Richard Hatchett, the chief executive of the vaccine consortium. They all have the ability to impose export controls. They all have the ability to nationalize their vaccine industry.
If that is what happens, the dangers proliferate.
If there are epidemics out of control in parts of the world, said Dr. Berkley, of the Gavi Alliance, we will never get control of this because the virus will come back and continue to spread.
Reporting was contributed by Hari Kumar, Karan Deep Singh, Kai Schultz, Javier Hernandez and Andrew Jacobs.
As the daughter of an air force officer and a nurse, I am fascinated by defence systems. There is none more impressive than the human immune system, equipped as it is with a rich arsenal to defend against different types of pathogen. Viruses have evolved to trick, bypass and evade these defences. Our immune systems have, in turn, learned to recognise and deter these virus stealth tactics. In Covid-19, the enemy is a tiny piece of genetic material wearing a lipid coat and a protein crown.
So how is our immune system able to defend against viral infections, and how does this apply to Covid-19? The virus that causes Covid-19 is called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (Sars-Cov-2), and was first detected in humans around five months ago. It is a coronavirus. Corona, in Latin, means crown. The virus is adorned with an outer layer of protein covered in spikes, like a crown. These spikes help the virus attach itself to target cells. The research community is fast learning about immunity to Covid-19, and we are also applying our knowledge of similar respiratory viruses to predict what to expect in this infection.
Importantly, Covid-19 cannot gain entry to our homes or bodies by itself we have to let it in
Think of a virus as a robot; it cannot reproduce so it needs a factory of materials proteins, lipids and nucleotides to build copies of itself. The coat allows the virus to attach itself to the target cells membrane. The virus then fuses with the cell and releases a shopping list of instructions on how to build and assemble new viruses. This shopping list, the virus genome, is written in nucleotides (RNA). The first job of a virus that enters our bodies is to invade target cells so that it can comfortably remove its coat and deploy its RNA.
Once inside, the virus commandeers the cell and borrows cellular machinery to build more viruses before immune cells detect the intruders and raise the alarm. Antibody proteins that are able to stick to the virus-spike proteins, and prevent attachment to the target cells, are called neutralising antibodies: generating them is often the goal of protective vaccination.
Our infected cells make the ultimate sacrifice and invite their own destruction by displaying distress signals for T-cells, which swiftly detect and kill them. T-cells are cytotoxic powerful serial killers that can recognise peptide fragments of virus displayed on the infected cell surface. When they do, they release a payload of toxic enzymes that kill the infected cell in a kiss of death. This strategic martyrdom is organised by the immune system to deprive the virus of its replication factories and can lead to the reduction of viral load in the patient. It takes several days for antiviral T-cells to expand and antibodies to be generated. Heres the silver lining: memory cells ensure that if we encounter the same virus again, we can react immediately with pre-existing defences. Sars-Cov-2 is new to humanity so we have no protective immunological memory. Vaccines prepared using harmless parts of the virus can help us build protective memory.
The viruss enemy superpower is spreading. The virus achieves this through shedding from infected patients. Sars-Cov-2 is expert at hopping from person to person, and in some people, it achieves a stealthy existence with mild or no symptoms. Once many copies of the virus are made, it needs to jump to another host. It hitches a ride on droplets that can be coughed or sneezed to a distance of up to two metres. Droplets can survive on surfaces for several hours enabling pick-up by a new host, or they can be directly inhaled if another person is in close proximity. Studies are emerging into animal hosts so far the virus has been detected in a few ferrets, cats, tigers and dogs. No animal deaths have yet been reported, and we dont know if animals can transmit back to humans.
The age differential in fatalities for Covid-19 suggests, with some exceptions, that a healthy immune system is usually able to control infection. Meanwhile, an ageing or weakened immune system may struggle to deploy a protective arsenal. Importantly, Sars-Cov-2 cannot gain entry to our homes or bodies by itself we have to let it in. This is why official advice has centred around cleaning our hands and avoiding touching our faces.
We know that a healthy immune system is usually able to eliminate infection in a couple of weeks. However, we have no understanding of the components of our immune arsenal that contribute to this feat: some vaccines work by creating potent neutralising antibodies; other vaccines generate powerful memory T-cells. Antiviral antibodies emerge as early as three to four days after virus detection, but are they protective against future reinfection? We believe that antibodies to other coronaviruses (Sars, Mers) last from one to three years. Because this is a new virus, we dont yet know the answer to this question. Public Health England is recruiting 16,000 to 20,000 volunteers to monitor antibodies once a month for six to 12 months to confirm whether we can generate long-lasting antibody responses to Sars-Cov-2. Determining the quality of these antibodies will be important to understanding long-term protection.
What is our most potent immune weapon against Covid-19? Cytotoxic T-cells may play an important role. Immunologists and virologists are working together to discover the correlates of protection, to design vaccines that offer long-term defences against Covid-19. Years of investment in research means that we can use existing approaches to respond to this new threat, and early mobilisation of research funders, philanthropists and academics are diverting resources to bolster these efforts on an unprecedented scale. Experience has taught us that vaccines are able to eradicate infections from this planet (for instance, smallpox), and medicines against viruses that dont embed their genetic material to our own (for example, hepatitis C) can also achieve this.
Our secret weapon is research. Scientists are working hard on understanding Covid-19, and collaboration is key to this effort. But until a vaccine or treatment is available, we ought to work hard to protect ourselves and our families: isolate and prevent transmission by using physical distancing, face masks and sensible hygiene. If we all do our part, this little virus holding the world to ransom wont stand a chance.
Zania Stamataki is a senior lecturer and researcher in viral immunology at the University of Birmingham
